Single-channel video installation, Seismic Communication Instrument, pigment print on neoprene, 23 min. English.
Imaginary Explosions follows an affiliation of transfeminist scientists cooperating with the desires of the mineral earth to simultaneously erupt all volcanoes. Through episodic videos, the scientists interpret volcanic activities across place and time. Their shared objectives are to divest technoscientific instruments of their military and corporate power, and to re-embody them in the service of the mineral earth. The non-fictional research of an archaeology team is woven into the inventive narrative of Episode 2, as signals arrive from a cave at the foot of the Chaitén volcano in Chile.
Imaginary Explosions draws upon geology and embodied knowledges to investigate how deep time and interspecies communication might assist us in radical planetary transformation. Artists and scholars whose real-life work pushes the limits of science and culture depict fictionalized versions of themselves in the videos and collaborate on the scores, narratives, and sculptures. The speculative fiction cosmology explores what other presents and futures become possible once we begin to think beyond the framework of the human.
Caitlin Berrigan, born in 1981 in Arcata, USA, lives between Berlin, Vienna, and New York. Her work encompasses performance, video, sculpture, and text to engage with the intimate and embodied dimensions of power, politics, and capitalism. Imaginary Explosions was the subject of a solo show at Art in General, New York (2019), and an artist’s book with Broken Dimanche Press, Berlin (2018). She is a faculty affiliate at NYU and a researcher in the PhD-in-Practice program at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. Her work has been shown at museums and art institutions worldwide.
